Staff

Emma Bartley is Split This Rock’s Administrative Assistant. A recent college graduate with an academic background in Literature & Creative Writing, she is passionate about poetry’s ability to empower and enlighten, and has dedicated her professional years to arts education and programming. With internship experience at the Smithsonian and The National Endowment for the Arts, and having held the Editor-in-Chief position of her university’s literary magazine, Emma is trained in the many facets of arts administration, including event planning, volunteer coordination, and financial management.

Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). She is co-founder and Executive Director of Split This Rock and an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. She is the recipient of artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Adirondack Center for Writing, and the Creative Communities Initiative. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and POETRY magazine. Since 2006, Browning has co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. She previously worked supporting socially engaged women artists with WomenArts and developing creative writing workshops with low-income women and youth with Amherst Writers & Artists. She has been an organizer in public housing communities and a grassroots political organizer on a host of social and political issues.

Chelsea Iorlano is Split This Rock’s Director of Youth Programs. At Split This Rock, Chelsea draws on her personal experience as a poet and professional experiences working with youth who are under-supported to provide high quality programs to young people in the DC metro area. Chelsea believes in the power of poetry to express and celebrate difference and build power to transform individuals and communities. With an academic background in English & Creative Writing focused on poetry, Chelsea has gained experience in the nonprofit sector, including volunteer and program management at For Love of Children, and fundraising and development at Asian American LEAD. Chelsea applies her beliefs and experiences to cultivate spaces in which young people can thrive, lead, and empower their communities. In her free time, Chelsea finds joy and solace in listening to music, reading, and journaling.

(Photo by Brandon Woods)

Camisha Jones is Split This Rock’s Managing Director. Camisha has over 20 years experience as a program planner at non-profits and institutions of higher education. Programs she has led have focused on anti-bias dialogue, volunteer coordination, leadership development, youth enrichment, and community building. Camisha is the author of Flare (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and a recipient of a 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship from The Loft Literary Center. A 2013 National Poetry Slam participant, her poems can be found at Poets.org, Button Poetry,Fledgling Rag, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Typo, Rogue Agent, pluck!, Unfolding the Soul of Black Deaf Expressions, and The Quarry, Split This Rock’s social justice poetry database. She is also published in Let’s Get Real: What People of Color Can’t Say and Whites Won’t Ask about Racism (StirFry Seminars & Consulting, Inc., 2011), Class Lives: Stories from Across Our Economic Divide (ILR Press, 2014), and The Day Tajon Got Shot (Shout Mouse Press, 2017), as well as at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Find her on Facebook as Poet Camisha Jones, on Twitter as 1Camisha, on Instagram as 1camisha, and online at her blog.

Melissa Tuckey is a co-founder of Split This Rock and the organization's Eco-Justice Poetry Project Coordinator. She’s editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, now available from University of Georgia Press. Tenuous Chapel, her book of poems, was selected by Charles Simic for the ABZ First Book Award in 2013. Other honors include a Black Earth Institute fellowship and a winter fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have been anthologized in DC Poets Against the War anthology, Ecopoetry, Fire and Ink: Social Action Writing and most recently in Truth to Power and recent work has appeared in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Cutthroat, Kenyon Review, and Missouri Review. Melissa lives in Ithaca, New York.

poem of the week

Talk Ugly

Typhoon Poem

by: Patrick Rosal

all the zillion spoons whacking
the rusty roofs, all the wicked tin streams
flipping full-grown bucks off their hooves.
Everywhere there used to be a river,
there’s a bigger river now. Every hard face
on the block is sopping...